Category: Article

Marvin’s Room is about the struggle to keep going in the face of impending death. Naturally, it’s a comedy, and a remarkably gentle-natured one. Although the play grew out of the AIDS epidemic, playwright Scott McPherson opted to move the setting outside the gay community. A wise choice; the issues it raises about caretaking for the seriously ill are universal, and will only grow more prominent as the U.S. population ages. The story revolves around the relationship between estranged sisters Bessie and Lee. Bessie, the responsible one, has given up her dreams to take care of their slowly dying father. But when she is herself diagnosed with leukemia, she has to find a way to reconcile with the flighty Lee, who’s also struggling with her arsonist teenage son. This all has the potential to descend into mawkishness, but McPherson’s black humor offsets any excess sap. His own story adds authenticity and pathos; McPherson wrote the play while he and his partner were both dying of AIDS, and he would not live long enough to write another one. Theatre in the Round, (612) 333-3010, www. theatreintheround.org

George Bernard Shaw didn’t shrink from a fight. The ardent socialist not only agitated for social change through his writings, but helped create the leftist movement that would become Britain’s Labour Party. Even in a career such as his, though, this comedy stands apart, because the profession in question was prostitution. Incredibly provocative when Shaw wrote it in 1894, Mrs. Warren shocked Victorian audiences with its title character, a good mother who made her career choice because the other options as a poor single woman were even more degrading—and that lack of opportunity for a better life was what really made Shaw mad. The play was such a hot property it had to wait 11 years and cross the ocean to New York before it could be staged. Even then, the cast was arrested after the first performance, and it didn’t debut in England for another two decades. Somehow, we doubt Mrs. Warren is any less challenging or relevant today. Guthrie Theater, (612) 377-2224, www.guthrietheater.org

Whew! One of the truisms of the theater business is, of course, that the show must go on—even after Jeune Lune’s incredible year. Their recent production of Hamlet was widely acclaimed to be the finest staging of Shakespeare this town has ever seen—which is saying something, given the Guthrie’s longtime stake on that turf. We live in physical and literal times, and the Jeune Lune’s traditional approach to pomp and circumstance in drama—big costumes, stunning sets, lots of action—plays well, we think, to the Fear Factor generation. The Guthrie isn’t the only theater who should be feeling the heat: Now our friends on 2nd Avenue are putting together what looks like a local version of a Cirque du Soleil operation. (Perhaps Jeune Lune operatives learned a few tricks when they hosted Cirque’s gala premiere after-party last summer.) A Circus of Tales is billed as a fairy tale in a circus ring—we suspect it’ll have more narrative direction than a typical Cirque offering, and less of a freak-show-meets-the-X-Games sensibility. (Don’t get us wrong, we love a freak-show-meets-the-X-Games sensibility, but we also don’t mind a little narrative direction.) Theatre de la Jeune Lune, (612) 333-6200, www.jeunelune.org

As part of their Saturday Midnight Movie series, the Uptown follows up Almodóvar’s Talk to Her with the first of his films with wide distribution outside Spain. 1988’s Verge is a black comedy about a woman whose lover has left and won’t tell her why. She tries to contact him throughout the day and ends up running into his new lover, his wife, a friend wanted by the police, and Antonio Banderas, who wants to sublet her apartment but ends up repairing her phone. A couple of wild taxi rides through Madrid, a unique gazpacho recipe, and Arab terrorists somehow work their way in as well. It’s very funny, in a twisted way, and foreshadows the over-the-top characters to come in Almodóvar’s future films.

Matthew Barney’s experimental five-part series has become the toast of the museum crowd, while flying beneath the radar of the average moviegoer. You may have seen his name in the gossip columns, since he just had a child in September with Icelandic diva Bjork. (And you thought your mom and dad were weird.) Their couplehood echoes their complementary approaches to art; if you like Ms. Gudmunds-dottir’s unapologetic avant-garde take on club music, you might want to check out Barney’s visually explosive reconstructions of genre film, reminiscent of David Cronenberg by way of Busby Berkeley. As you can tell from the series’ title, named for a muscle in the, erm, male reproductive system, Barney’s chief preoccupation is masculinity. Previous segments have taken inspiration from Norman Mailer’s The Executioner’s Song, spaghetti westerns, and Barney’s own experience as a football quarterback. Cremaster 3, the final and most elaborate of the quintet, explores creativity and male sexuality through rapidly shifting, dreamlike sequences, epitomized by a Masonic initiation rite involving buckets of liquid Vaseline, the Chrysler Building, and the hardcore punk band Agnostic Front. We’re just getting started, here: It’s also populated with disturbing, dreamlike mutants—a zombie of serial killer Gary Gilmore, a disabled athlete who chops potatoes with blades attached to her prosthetic legs, and so on. Rather than force an interpretation onto the material, just let the images wash over you, and let Barney’s subconscious filter into your own. Walker Art Center, (612) 375-7622, www. walkerart.org

In 1952, nobody expected any staying power out of Singin’ in the Rain. In fact, it was thrown together hastily out of old songs to cash in on Gene Kelly and Stanley Donen’s previous An American in Paris. That’s why the movie is set in the early days of Hollywood—to go along with music that was nostalgia-inducing even then. Part of its strength is that the dancing doesn’t have to carry the whole film by itself—the zingers traded between Kelly and Donald O’Connor (no mean dancer himself) are a treat, as well as the scenes poking fun at hapless silent actors flustering through the advent of talkies. But there’s a good reason why we all remember Gene swinging that umbrella and splashing through the puddles. One viewing of that robust boisterousness (and O’Connor’s backflip, while we’re at it), and you know why they called them hoofers. Move over, Moulin Rouge. The Heights is screening the 50th-anniversary restoration that’s been touring the country; as a cute additional touch, they’re giving away umbrellas. Heights Theater, (763) 788-9079, www.heightstheater.com

Roman Polanski’s best movies—Rosemary’s Baby, Repulsion, Chinatown—are all about dread and mistrust. But up until now he’s never made a film about the part of his personal history that very likely caused that rare affinity with dark material, namely his childhood in the Warsaw Ghetto during the Second World War. He’s wanted to film it his whole career, but never found the right vehicle until now. The Pianist is based on the autobiography of Wladyslaw Szpilman, a concert pianist who, with the rest of his family, barely escaped death at the Treblinka camp . It’s a story Polanski surely resonated with, having lost his mother at Auschwitz. And like Szpilman, Polanski hid in the ghetto with the help of compassionate strangers. The Pianist is being hailed as his best film in years, netting the Palm D’Or at this year’s Cannes, despite some complaints about coldness of tone. That doesn’t strike us as a problem—Polanski at his peak was a master of icy detachment; it’s his way of framing horror.

Jean Luc-Godard’s biggest popular success has been praised in some quarters as the greatest European artwork of the 20th century. We wish we liked it that much. To us, the film’s narrative weaknesses overpower its good points, and what others call iconoclastic genius, we call stubborn mulishness. Still, warts and all, Godard changed the direction of cinema as an art form. His 1960s New Wave work, among which Contempt is front and center, helped set off the wave of experimentalism that marked the decade. If you think Jean-Luc Godard is the captain of the starship Enterprise, it’s time to brush up on your film history. (And maybe your Star Trek lore too.) Contempt is several things at once: a self-consciously recursive film about filmmaking that casts the great German director Fritz Lang as himself. A recasting of The Odyssey with sneering film producer Jack Palance as a modern Cyclops. A study of the disintegration of a marriage, as Brigitte Bardot realizes she cannot trust her screenwriter husband Michel Piccoli. It’s beautifully shot (did we mention Bardot?), and this DVD showcases Raoul Coutard’s exquisite cinematography especially well. The colors are revitalized, and the image is back in its proper Cinemascope wide aspect—which makes a big difference despite Godard’s own sabotage by deliberately placing characters outside the frame. (There’s also a rich supply of supplemental material, the most interesting of which is an hour-long conversation about filmmaking between Godard and Lang.) Godard revelled in willful obscurity. In fact, after Contempt he turned his back on big-budget producers, preferring to make small films in which he was answerable to no one but his own muse.

Jennifer Aniston gets some kind of prize, perhaps a case of Turtle Wax, for being the first cast member of Friends to successfully anchor a drama on the big screen. Maybe it helps that Good Girl seems like a mild comedy on the surface. But there’s a shark under the waters. Director Miguel Arteta and screenwriter Mike White previously collaborated on the stalker-buddy movie Chuck & Buck, carving out a niche in stories about suffocating relationships among the socially damaged. Here again they take sadistic glee in placing their poor, normal protagonist adrift among a sea of losers and crazies. Aniston plays Justine, a well-meaning young woman trapped in a stifling marriage to Phil (John C. Reilly) and a stifling job at the soul-sucking Retail Rodeo. Enter Holden (Jake Gyllenhaal), a brooding college dropout with literary pretensions who seems to offer a chance of escape. They begin a secret affair, she playing Emma Bovary to his, well, Holden Caulfield. Of course, this isn’t the sort of film that goes for the happy ending. The writing is often cruel, but The Good Girl is redeemed by the emotional depth of its cast. We’ve come to expect good work from people like Reilly, Gyllenhaal, and Tim Blake Nelson, but Aniston is surprising and sympathetic in a role that takes her far beyond the boundaries of Rachel Green.

There are many ways to recognize a music snob, but probably the easiest is his insidious way of insisting that a band’s best work is invariably its earliest, least accessible stuff. In the case of New Order, of course, that early ouvre was Joy Division, the maudlin proto-gothic outfit from Manchester, England. We loved that dark, dense stuff 20 years ago—but then we grew up. Joy Division grew up too—or died, to be more accurate, after singer Ian Curtis hanged himself on the eve of their first American tour in 1980. Even the smartest rock critics were distracted by the tragedy, and didn’t notice that New Order rose from the ashes to redefine post-punk, heavily influence hip hop, and set the stage for modern electronica. How’d they do that? By taking their droney guitar rock and adding drum machines, synthesizers, and all the other impedimenta of the club scene. Today, historical revisionists rank New Order right up there with Kraftwerk as the pasty white progenitors of everything from Sir Mix-A-Lot to System of a Down.